


The Theory of Everything

by janependerwick



Category: The Penderwicks Series - Jeanne Birdsall
Genre: F/F, F/M, Friendship/Love, Romance, skyffrey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2018-12-21 01:27:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11933457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janependerwick/pseuds/janependerwick
Summary: Our story begins as they usually do, with a boy and a girl and an odd circumstance. The way in which our story unfolds however, is uniquely its own. Dear reader, this is a story that starts and pumps and stops like a heart, and there is very little you can do about any of it (the pumping, the stopping - both can be so violent).





	1. The Woman with the Red Umbrella

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Spark_Writer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spark_Writer/gifts).



The Theory of Everything

 _for Claire, thank you for always inspiring me_  
and  
for Tori, forever ago

Chapter One  
"The Woman with the Red Umbrella"

(Batty-11, Jane-17, Skye-17 (almost 18), Rosalind-19)

_Our story begins as they usually do, with a boy and a girl and an odd circumstance. The way in which our story unfolds however, is uniquely its own._

_Our story begins with a man sitting in the backseat of a taxicab on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street. The man is young. The arms on his jacket are a bit too short and his nose is slightly crooked. The man first sees her through a grimy taxicab window that seems to obscure the beauty of everything in the grey city but no, no. Not her. When he first sees her, his chin is resting on the cracked vinyl of the door and his nose is pressed into the glass so that it turns up a bit, like children do to amuse their friends on the other side. When he first sees her, the red umbrella catches his attention but the look on her face makes his head snap up and bump ungracefully against the doorframe. Her mouth… goodness that mouth. Mouth like the latch on a locket. Mouth like it’s going to rain. Mouth like a chrysanthemum. Snapdragon, thistle, marigold mouth!_

_The woman is running, rounding the corner onto Seventh Avenue with her clothes flying and her red umbrella above her acting more like a parachute in the cold wind than it should. She is grinning like a small child, gleeful and terrified like you might be in a game of tag. Her tongue pokes out of the corner of her mouth in determination, and his heart stutters a bit in his chest. He realizes that she is running toward the bus stop almost immediately, because he had chased down a few buses at that corner himself._

_He is waving his hands then, rather pointlessly in the air, at the girl, at the cabbie, at this girl. When he finds his words he tells the cabbie to stop, thanks, and yes I realize we have only gone maybe forty feet or so and no, keep the change. And then he stumbles out of the cab and onto the wet streets of New York, New York._

_The woman is still running and the bus, hulking on the corner like a thing alive, was belching steam into the cold misty air. Martin suddenly found himself running too, the water on the pavement soaking the bottom of his pant legs. Then, in a great culmination of sound and motion, Martin and the woman both reached the bus, just as it shuttered to life and the doors started to swing shut..._

_Martin threw out his hand and caught the doors at the last moment, squishing his fingers slightly before forcing the doors open again. The woman was laughing from behind him._

_"Goodness. Thank you."_

_"You're welcome."_

_With a quick step she was up and retreating into the belly of the beast, handing a small shiny coin to the bus driver with that laughing voice like wind chimes. He cursed himself as she walked away. What luck! He helped the girl of his dreams slip from his fingers!_

_"Are you coming?" he heard a small tinkling voice ask from inside the dark bus. He looked up to see her looking at him._

_"Where are you going?"_

_"Does it matter?" she asked, her mouth - god, her mouth - curving up into a small smile._

_Martin simply grunted and followed her in._

_Several stops later, she was laughing at his quiet jokes and the way his glasses sat askew on his nose. Several more stops and she touched his knees with a silent reverence. When she finally whispered that the next stop was hers, she produced a pen and wrote her telephone number in the curve of his wrist. As she walked away from him down the isle he called after her._

_"You never told me your name!"_

_"It's Elizabeth."_

_Elizabeth. The first time he whispered it, it tasted like the next seventy years of his life in his mouth._

_(Seventy years cut to twenty-four, twenty-four long enough for a thousand lives to be lived in between.)_

_Dear reader, this is a story that starts and pumps and stops like a heart, and there is very little you can do about any of it (the pumping, the stopping - both can be so violent)._

…

Skye was standing with the hot sun on her back, cloaked by a small cloud of dust. There was blood in the dirt and blood on her teeth and her knuckles connected with his jaw sending him to the dirt of the old school yard. Pain erupted in her hand and blood dribbled from his chin down her wrist. Her head was buzzing like a traffic light at midnight. Sweat dripped into her eyes as his friends jumped to separate them. Before they could pull her off, Skye spat in the dirt and with a feeling of grim triumph, walked away.

When Skye dropped Batty off at the elementary school for the last day before summer break holding another girl’s hand and grinning from ear to ear, Skye half expected this - the teasing, the crestfallen eyes, the bloodied lip. She also fully expected it to never happen again.

When Skye jumped the chain link fence to rejoin Batty on the sidewalk beside the school, Batty's eyes were wide and she looked positively horrified that Skye had just beaten up one of her classmates (albeit a very tall fifth grader). Skye rolled her eyes and took her hand because really, was she all that surprised? They walked for a few blocks like this, in the stifling heat and silence until Batty stopped dead in her tracks.

“Skye? Am I odd?”

Skye licked her chapped lips and struggled against the reeling head of the rage she felt in her chest. She suddenly felt very young, like she was eleven years old and kneeling in front of her younger sister in the grass in front of a mansion in the foothills of the Berkshires. Eleven-year-old heart the size of a fist, always swinging. Batty, alligator teardrop eyes and crumpling butterfly wings…

Skye rolled her tongue over her teeth, tasting the coppery slickness there and then knelt down in front of her sister, because even at eleven years old (heart like a fist, fist clutching another girl’s hand), Batty was much shorter than Skye.

“No, stupid. You’re perfect.”

…

And so Skye saved the day again, because Skye has always been brave. Batty was sitting on the back steps with Rosalind and Jane sitting on either side of her. Rosalind was holding a cold, damp towel to her lip and Jane was fretting.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Jane asked, and Rosalind shot her a dark look that told her to be quiet.

Batty shrugged. “I’m not very brave,” she mumbled against the towel.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Rosalind said, but Batty was pretty sure she only said it out of sisterly obligation.

Inside the house, Batty could hear Alec's booming laughter and a party popper being opened (probably courtesy of Ben). The Tiftons were in town for Skye and Jeffrey's high school graduation. She looked out across the yard where Skye was standing across from Jeffrey, wild hair like a mane, heart like a lion’s. Skye was the kind of brave that made itself known. She wore it around her shoulders like a cloak, and Batty swore she could almost see it settling around her collarbone, shimmering and unbreakable. It was something in her steel blue eyes, something in her gait, something in her swollen knuckles… Like now, when Skye turned hard on her heel and marched Jeffrey out the side gate in the direction of Quigley Wood, something about her radiated a confidence that Batty was nearly certain she would never possess.

…

Skye was laughing and racing ahead of Jeffrey, barefoot through the woods. The path had been beaten down by her own feet so many times before that the path had become worn and well defined. The woods around them blurred green and brown as they raced on. Jeffrey let out a whoop behind her that sent the cardinals scattering and fluttering around the canopy in a tizzy. Skye looked over her shoulder at him, laughing again at the goofy look of satisfaction on his face. “Come on!” she shouted, jumping over the creek at a particularly narrow part and charging up the bank on the other side. She hadn’t done this in years. The last time she had been here she had taken Batty, who insisted upon going slowly, picking their way through the trees. The sun peeked through the leaves above them and fell hot against her back and a cool wind wound its way around her shoulders. Everything smelled of leaf rot and damp wood, and for the first time in a long time, the decay was on the outside. Skye could breathe a little easier.

Skye didn’t stop running until she came to the double row of overgrown lilacs, where she turned around and walked backwards to watch Jeffrey’s face as they came upon the ruined house in the woods. He wore an expression of awe and exhaustion, and she grinned. If Skye were a more sentimental person (which _of course_ , she wasn't), she might wish to freeze this moment in time forever; chests heaving with effort, sweat making their shirts stick to their backs, his eyes looking young and wild like they were when they first met, before he was soft and doughy-eyed. It was good, and Skye wanted to curl up and die in it.

Skye came to the clearing where the foundations of the ancient house stood and stepped forward to lead Jeffrey through the gap where the door once was. She stopped in the middle of the old house and gestured around her.

“This place must have burned down years ago. Now it belongs to the birds and the rabbits.” A cardinal swooped down from the top of the chimney as if to prove her point. “It’s kinda my special place.”

Jeffrey let out a low whistle and stooped down to run his fingers over the stone.

“Why are you showing me this?”

Skye sighed and blew a long breath out between her teeth. “I’m extending an olive branch.”

“You’re what?”

“It’s a peace offering, stupid. I mean, we’re still best friends, right? After everything?” After stair-top conversations and phone-whisper confessions?

“Oh,” he said. “Of course.” But Skye saw his eyes say something different than his mouth, and she lurched forward to catch his sleeve before he could turn away from her and rearrange his facial features into careful indifference again.

“Jeffrey.” She whipped him around to face her with a sharp tug at his shirt. “You said you were over it.”

“I never said I was over it, I said I would stop bothering you about it,” he said, mouth twisting bitterly. A surprisingly cool wind blew across the clearing, making the hair that usually lays flat against his forehead stand out at an odd angle.

“Well, get over it. I told you it wasn’t going to happen.” She was trying to sound angry, but her voice was desperate. Why couldn’t he understand?

“I know Skye.”

“Then why are we still doing this?”

“Because I can’t. Okay? I can’t.” Why can’t _she_ understand? She was twisting his sleeve hard enough now that it hurt. Everything hurt.

She looked down but her iron grip remained solid. “Don’t say that,” she said.

Jeffrey sighed. “Skye, let go of me.”

“Not until you let go of me,” she said. He knew what she meant.

“No.”

Skye twisted his sleeve harder and made some inhuman noise in the back of her throat before she wrenched him forward and kissed him hard. It was an angry kiss. It was a surprising click of teeth and lips that were hard and tasted metallic. It was two hearts clenching painfully and curled fingers digging into wrists. She kissed him because she was seventeen and reckless, young and angry, and because even with her mouth open against his, he was her best friend and she needed him to understand. She ripped her mouth away after impossibly long seconds, and when his eyes slid open to look into hers, her thunderstorm eyes flashed betrayal. In that moment he knew. Finally, he _knew._

…

In truth, her heart is a heart held in a hand that's balled into a fist.

There is no release in this analogy and no release in her love.

In truth, her heart was a heart always and forever her own.

…

Skye didn’t go home. Instead she wandered through the town; along the deer trails in the woods, through backyards, along sidewalks until she got to where she didn’t know she was going. It was fitting though, she supposed, for her feet to take her here. After everything (after stair-top conversations and house-ruin kisses) she felt that she needed to lay a great something to rest. What better place to bury your almost-ghosts than a cemetery?

Skye climbed over the brittle rod iron fence and caught her pants just once on the intricate ironwork. The air was cooler here than it had been in the woods, something about the thick shade and cold bodies.

She picked her way through the dandelions and thistles to where the familiar headstone stood guard under the shade of a maple tree. She dropped to her knees with a soft thump in the dirt and she forced herself not to think about the bones beneath her. The stone, though worn smooth with age hadn’t changed over the years and Skye took comfort in this, reaching out to trace the letters there that her fingers knew well (M O T H E R).

She and her sisters visited here often, but it was always alone and never something they talked about. Skye only knew about their visits by the things they left behind. Rosalind, for example, left fresh bunches of primroses from the woods every Tuesday during the spring and summer months. Jane left words – bits of poetry and prose - written on little scraps of paper and tucked into the crannies of the rock. Batty had been to their mother’s grave exactly once, and Skye only knew this because Batty asked her to drive her there once a few years ago. Skye had been curious enough to oblige without complaining, and remembered waiting in the idling car in front of the old church as Batty scampered around the back to the graveyard gate like it was yesterday. Batty left nothing, or so Skye thought. ( _Though the churchgoers swore that if you listened closely, you could hear the little tune that Batty had left dancing through the trees that day.)_ And Skye? Skye left fistfuls of frustrations. After all, they say that her mother had the same obdurate spirit as her, so Skye figured she would understand.

Today, she left a memory of a kiss and melting green eyes, forcing it from her body into the ground where she was hoping she could leave six feet under _(Silly girl, don’t you know how ghost haunt? How dirt and death don’t make a difference?)._ It wasn't very scientific, but for once Skye didn't care. When it came to her mother, Skye was every bit a blind believer as the churchgoers. When she felt satisfied – foolishly, blindly – that the thing was buried from sight, she sat back on her hands and let the cool air wash her of the woods and his hands.

The day was beautiful; warm where the sun fell in patches on the grass, cool where the shade fell in the negatives, insects and birds teeming at the edge of the forest. Skye could feel the bitterness in her bones fading as he slipped from her mind. As her gaze floated around she spotted a man standing in the shade of the elm near the gate. It was her father, looking ghostly and surreal in the hazy light, his arms behind his back. Skye wondered for a brief moment if he was an apparition of sorts, the bit of his spirit that he laid to rest with her mother. Ridiculous thoughts! How illogical! This was the first time Skye doubted that seeing was really believing and she left this little betrayal of science with her mother, buried in a grave of its own.

She rose to her feet and went to him. Never mind how he knew she was here, he always seemed to know anyway. When she reached him he wrapped an arm around her shoulder and they walked slowly through the cool graveyard, through the kissing gate and to the pickup truck that her father had bought off of Aunt Claire for four hundred dollars when Flashvan finally broke down.

As Skye was buckling her seatbelt, he looked at her carefully for a long moment before turning the key in the ignition and bringing the sputtering truck to life.

“Want to tell me how, exactly, you made a teenage boy cry?”

Skye huffed. “Daddy, don’t ask such absurd questions.”

He shook his head fondly, wearily, and didn’t ask again.

…

That night when she fell into a restless sleep, Skye dreamed of a burning house and a boy inside that she couldn’t get out. She lied down next to him and watched the firelight dance on his familiar face until it over took both of them in a flash of light and heat. The last thing she saw was the smoke in his eyes before she woke up.

No one who loves either of them speaks of the “graduation party incident” and the sore festers.

 


	2. The Bomb Squad

Chapter Two   
"The Bomb Squad"

(Batty-12, Jane-18, Skye-19, Rosalind-20)

_His roommate’s name is Todd, who is scrawny like himself and has a smattering of freckles on his cheekbones that stand out like drops of ink on white paper. None of Todd’s clothes fit him quite right, because no sports coat is cut slim enough for his thin waist or has arms long enough to reach his wrists. But no matter, Todd makes up for his lack of bulk with swagger and zeal. Todd considers himself an expert on girls, and Martin is a novice at best, so Martin usually listens closely to the advice that Todd bestows on him on the subject. But when Martin mentions that he and Elizabeth were going on a date to the botanical gardens, and Todd vehemently protests that "no pretty girl wants to look at plants," Martins simply shakes his head._

_"You don't know THIS girl."_

_Elizabeth met him in the glass conservatory in the prettiest dress he thought he had ever seen, smiling and talking about a garden she tended to when she was eleven. She held his hand in the rose garden and laughed over his clumsy explanations about the science of snapdragons. In the orchid room, he accidently told her he was “probably was in love with her” and sometimes mistakes like these end beautifully. When she left, she smiled into his neck and said “forget-me-not” before laughing at her own pun, and... yes he was sure now, he was in love._

…

Batty was walking Duchess when she ran into Charlie for the first time. Or rather, he ran into her. Batty had been happily minding her own business as Duchess waddled in front of her, her belly swinging low. While Duchess had admittedly lost a lot of weight since Batty reluctantly started her dog walking business, Batty was still hesitant to classify Duchess’ movement as anything more athletic than a waddle.

When Batty first met Charlie, the church bells two streets over were playing Mozart but he was bobbing his head to the Smith’s _There Is A Light That Never Goes Ou_ t. Batty didn’t see him coming, but Duchess did, and took off towards the boy with the headphones before Batty could do anything about it. There was a tangled leash and legs, wide eyes, and then limbs splayed out on the pavement and a Walkman skittering to a stop a few feet away.

“Sorry,” Batty mumbled as she attempted to disentangle Duchess from the boy.

The boy picked himself up and brushed at the dust on the front of his jeans. Batty, still leaning backwards against the strain of Duchess at the end of the leash, took a moment to take the strange boy in. He had dark curly hair and blue eyes and an odd, wiry frame.

“It’s okay kiddo,” he chirped, inspecting the state of a skinned elbow.

Batty’s head snapped up, and she narrowed her eyes as she tried to figure out what he was getting at with the nickname. His bright blue eyes were blinking back at her, wide and honest, and Batty swore she could see a mist clearing in them, like he had been in some otherworldly place before the mishap with Duchess. Finding him to not pose much of a threat, she stooped to pick up his Walkman.

“How old are you anyways?” she asked.

“Twelve years and two months.” He ran a hand through his messy hair, and Batty wondered when the last time he thought to brush it was.

Batty nodded and then pointed at herself with her thumb. “Twelve years and three months,” she said, fighting a feeling of sly triumph. _Kiddo. Ha!_ He nodded briskly. It felt like a business transaction, but when you are only twelve years old, age is every bit as important as names. She soon learned that his was Charlie Fink.

Batty looked the Walkman over, checking for cracks, when the song still filtering though the headphones made Batty freeze.

“You like good music.” She hit the next button on the player, and the Smiths were replaced by Joy Division. Batty was reminded of the records that Jeffrey had bought for her when he introduced her to "the classics."

“What?”

“You like _good_ music.”

The boy grinned then, his eyes suddenly crystal clear. “Would you like to listen?”

…

Jane was muttering poems under her breath about the oppressive summer heat when she walked into the 7/11. Conveniently nestled in the crook of the road that ran between the high school and the main residential area, the gas station had become a popular hangout for Jane and her friends during their senior year. Now, in the middle of the dog days of summer, she visited the place mainly for the purpose of cherry slushes when the heat made writing unbearable.

He looked like a lonely god among candy bars and energy drinks. Or that’s what she would later write in her notebook about him. Jane stopped dead in her tracks when she saw him, her lips still wrapped around the straw of her cherry slush in an ‘o’ and her sneakers sticking to the floor where someone had obviously spilled a soda. He was wearing a white tee shirt and dark, bold lines tattooed on his skin peeked out from his collar and his sleeves. He was holding a pamphlet from a rack at the front of the store with a map of Massachusetts when he looked up at her.

“Are you from here?”

Jane thought he was probably a fallen angel. That perhaps his voice was the gospel. She nodded, and realizing that she had yet to remove the straw from her mouth, did so.

“Can you help me out then?” he asked, lifting the map as he bobbed his shoulder in a shrug.

He tells her is name is Noah (like the arc, he says, only less destined) and he buys her a package of liquorish in return for her help. Sitting on the curb outside the gas station, Jane used his map and a blue ballpoint pen to draw a line along the roads he would need to get to his uncle’s house as he stole sips of her slush, staining his tongue and teeth red. His grin was something wolfish and wild and Jane grinned back at him with red lips unafraid.

“Are you passing through?” she asked, stealing the slush back and taking a sip. The taste was like sucking on cough drops.

He took the slush back with nimble fingers. “I think I might stay awhile.” Jane examined his hands, remembering something that Rosalind mentioned about learning things about a person based on what their hands look like. Noah’s were slim and quick, but they shook slightly. She wondered what that meant. “My uncle offered me a job hauling goods for his store. Since I have the truck and everything,” he said, pointing a thumb in the direction of a dark green pickup in the parking lot. “He isn’t paying much but it’s enough to get me where I want to go.”

“Where are you going?”

This made his eyes shimmer with something violently wild. Jane felt chills run up the ladder of her spine only to throw themselves into the chasm of her chest. He leaned closer.

Everything smelled like gasoline and the church bells four streets over were playing Mozart.

“Everywhere,” he said.

And Jane fell in love.

…

The way Jane saw it, everyone was given one big mistake in life, like a get-out-of-jail-free card. The kind where you get away with it even though you know you shouldn’t have. The kind that leaves you wide-eyed and eager to learn and move on.

In a year Jane would look back, shaking her head and laughing slightly, counting this day as her one big mistake.

In several years she would run a knotted hand though her greying hair and change her mind. She would think of the boy – the red-tongued boy, the wolf boy, the boy with the trembling hands - only in wry fondness, but that would not be for many years to come.

…

“He is a sleaze,” Skye said from somewhere in the kitchen.

“Tattoos do not necessarily equate to sleaziness, Skye,” Jane quipped back.

“No, but there is generally a correlation.”

Batty rolled her eyes at her sisters’ bickering and took Charlie’s hand, dragging him inside the house and toward the stairs.

The pair collapsed on her bedroom floor, their small legs folding under them like bird wings, their knees just barely touching. Charlie pulled the Walkman from his pocket, disconnected the thing from the headphones and punched the play button.

_Today_ by The Smashing Pumpkins came on. Batty lost her breath over it.

“Someday I’m going to get a guitar. I’ve been saving money, see?” The boy produced eleven dollars and seventy-eight cents from his pocket.

“I have a lawn mowing business,” he explained and Batty nodded seriously. “Anyway, once I get my guitar, this is going to be the first song I learn. I am going to be in a band one day.”

Batty had seen a blind man fall to wasted knees to pray. Watched the men on the TV catching bullets in the name of god. Watched as a woman in the super market grasped her arm tightly and warned about a flood, no, a fire. They were all asking Batty to believe, but she didn’t have that kind of faith to give just yet.

What Batty did believe in, was music. Maybe it was the ubiquity of the thing, the universal nature of the language. Maybe it was simply because music made sense to her, and in such a messy world, that counted for something. Whatever the reason, Batty followed the music, consistently, blindly. Charlie reached over and put his hand on her knee, tapping out the beat to _Today_ into her skin with his fingers. Syncopating now, switching to double time. Like a complex Morse code that she felt unlocking all her doors from the inside.

She wasn’t sure what it was but that blue look and those fingers that could find a beat in the silence made her think that perhaps he wouldn’t leave.

After all, Batty had faith in the music.

...

“Love is a landmine, don’t you think?” Jane's mouth was set in a serious line, though her lips, stained a goofy cherry slush-red, mocked her own seriousness. She was thinking about a boy.

Skye snorted ungracefully and wiped at her eyebrows with her shirtsleeve. What a ridiculous metaphor. She passed a beautiful, hard ball to Jane.

Jane trapped it at her feet and neatly scored in the pop up goal they had set up in the backyard. She was persistent. “Think about it. You never see it coming until the wreckage of your heart is everywhere.”

Skye rolled it over on her tongue and decided she liked the gore. She relented.

“I think… I think I am a very scared member of the bomb squad.”

The pair collapsed into the overgrown grass, sweaty and content.

"I thought you weren't scared of anything," Jane said, and then she paused, remembering a tragic night in middle school and a play about rainbows. "Except like... the performing arts."

Skye shuddered at the memory and then shrugged dismissively. Jane nodded and let it go. She supposed it was best not press her older sister on such matters. She stole the ball from where it lay in the grass next to Skye, and took full advantage of the head start as she took off toward the goal. The two sisters played soccer in the backyard until they smashed an urn with a poorly aimed soccer ball.

 


	3. Blue Summer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chap is too poetic for it's own good, but again... a tribute to my younger self. Rated T for language.

Chapter Three

"Blue Summer"

(Batty-13, Jane-19, Skye-20, Rosalind-21)

_Elizabeth lobbed a bottle of nail polish at Martin from where she stood in her bare feet in the bathroom. Her toes were freshly painted bright red. Now the wall behind Martin's head was too. Elizabeth was furious with him. Which was... fair. He had gotten so caught up working on his thesis on the evolutionary origins of Nepenthes ventricosa that he had forgotten to pay the electricity bill. And so, Elizabeth was throwing things in the dark, and Martin was standing in the middle of the living room, thinking she looked lovely._

_"Please stop, honey," Martin pleaded. He snatched a pillow off the couch to use as shield against the many projectiles being launched from the bathroom. A comb whizzed by his ear. "I'll pay it first thing in the morning, I swear."_

_Elizabeth threw a curling iron at him. Not a hot one of course... Martin was secretly very glad he forgot to pay the electricity bill in that moment._

_"How can I trust you with children someday when you can't even remember to pay the bills! I reminded you!"_

_Elizabeth was now marching toward him, blue eyes blazing, brandishing a hairbrush like a sword. Martin might have laughed if her face hadn't been so damn serious._

_She swung the hairbrush and caught the corner of Martin's pillow with a soft thump. He gulped and backed up, stumbling over the couch in the process and knocking the glasses clear off his face._

_Elizabeth seemed stunned for a moment. "I'm sorry," she whispered. She rushed to pick up his glasses from where they had fallen. When they had both straightened back up, she situated them carefully on his nose for him. "I'm sorry," she said again._

_"I'm sorry I forgot to pay the bill," Martin offered, smiling slightly._

_She sighed and looked around at the contents of her bathroom, now strewn across their living room. She ducked her head, suddenly embarrassed. "We'll just have an electricity free evening?"_

_Martin grinned and she kissed his jaw. Martin ordered Chinese takeout, and Elizabeth lit candles in every dark corner._

...

The summer was starting and everybody was leaving.

The first person Batty ever loved had floppy hair and a quick smile. He collected baseball cards and bottle caps and kissed her over the garden gate on the first warm day of spring. It was a bumbling kiss. A bumping of noses, a quick press of lips… Batty was pretty sure she could have written a sonata to the thing. When he moved away at the start of summer, Batty cried and Charlie bought them two tickets to the orchestra with his guitar fund money. He held her hand through all of the beautiful things and all of the discord. By the fifth movement, Batty was feeling significantly better and they snuck away to buy ice cream cones for two dollars at the corner store downtown.

Spring gave way to summer, and Batty soon forgot all about the boy. And so first crushes go.

The first day of summer was drip-drop lazy. Full of white silhouettes and red, white, and blue popsicles dribbling down wrists.

Blue nights.

Celestial lights.

Soft edges.

Hazy.

Batty licked a drop of red popsicle syrup from her thumb as she kicked a bottle cap down the street. Next to her in the road, Charlie was balancing his bike with one hand and licking at a vanilla ice cream cone in the other. They meandered up the block towards a house that once belonged to a certain bottle cap boy.

When the house came into view, Batty slowed to a stop. The “For Sale” sign was gone from the front yard and brown boxes wrapped in packing tape replaced it. A new family must have moved into the neighborhood. Batty wondered briefly if they had kids her age to be friends with.

"Batty!" Charlie called, biking in lazy circles as he waited for her to catch up.

Batty noticed a girl standing on the porch and slurping on a mostly empty glass of tea. She was about Batty's age and very pretty. Batty suddenly felt very heavy.

The girl had a peach colored frock dress. Peach colored lips. A peach pit heart you would never expect. ( _Dear reader, don't you know what happens to girls that can't stop dreaming of orchards?)_

“Batty, c’mon,” Charlie threw over his shoulder as he pedaled away.

Batty fought against a memory, surfacing from the depths of her mind like something great and terrible. The memory was incessant, tugging at the corners of her brain until Batty felt her will crumble and the image took over. In the memory it's summer and everything is overripe, the kind where the fruit hangs heavy and the sky bruises easily. The sun is shining between the leaves and Batty is looking down on a family in a peach orchard. She recognizes the daughter; the steel blue eyes and blonde hair could be none other than her sister Skye. But the woman who had Skye up on her shoulders, a splitting image of Skye herself…

“Batty!” Charlie called again.

This couldn’t be a memory, could it? Skye reached up into the leaves and plucked one of the sweet fruits. Below her, their mother was laughing.

“Batty!”

Batty shook her head and blinked. The girl on the porch was gone.

“Coming!"

...

Jane was sitting tall in the cab of his green truck when she left. Her eyes were wide, yawning, situated at the brink of everything. She waved as Noah pulled out of the driveway and Skye, standing barefoot in the lawn, almost threw up. Her father wrapped an arm around her.

"Sometimes you must lose yourself before you can find yourself," he said.

...

At the end of the summer, Skye packed her bags and headed out west again, back to school. She brought with her three large math books, a map of the lunar surface, and a telescope.

She did well, because of course she did. She was top of her class, respected by peers and professors alike. She called sometimes, from her dorm room floor, talking about quantum physics and the butterfly effect. Jane would hold the pay phone tightly to her ear, and Rosalind would balance the white cord phone between her cheek and shoulder as she painted her toes a deep blue. Skye spoke about a few boys at Caltech that all suspiciously had brown hair and green eyes. Rosalind said she has a type. Jane shook her head and knew better. They were all the same; smart, pretentious, majors in math or physics with a penchant for astronomy. Jane called them "the lunar boys" because they rambled something about the stars and came and went as quickly as the phases of the moon.

There was one boy who stayed. He was the first to do so without asking Skye’s permission, and this was startling enough to her that she let him. He was odd and gorgeous (Jane's words, not hers) and believed in Santa Clause for the longest time. He had freckles in the shape of the big dipper ( _Ursa Major_ , Skye corrected). She let him get comfortable there, in the crux of heart, and suddenly he was sleeping in her bed and making her coffee in the mornings and she was wearing his sweatshirt. It was all disgustingly domestic if you asked her.

Whirlwind of a girl.

Boy paper-thin.

A door slamming behind her.

The headlines all read: _Lights all Askew in the Heavens_ and _Stars not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to be, but Nobody Need Worry._

She drove out to the coast and found that the ocean had turned black. When she called, she spoke out the west slipping off into the sea. When the moon disappeared, she packed up her things and headed home. What she was looking for could no longer be found in the California hills.

“I am going to Boston. Transferring to Harvard. It's better this way.”

He sputtered and tipped over a stack of papers on black holes and dark matter. The heavy stuff you can’t see. She watched it float to his ankles before looking at him. When his eyes asked her to stay, Skye smiled, almost sadly, and toed an article about the mysterious gravity in all that space.

She thought about a boy.

And all that _fucking_ space.

“You don’t even know me,” she said. And that was that.

When she arrived in Boston, even the flowers cried when they saw her.

…

"Batty c'mon!" Ben said. He tugged harder at her shirtsleeves.

Nick was home and Batty was taking a carefully balanced casserole and a very excited boy across the street to see him. Fragile things and boys don't mix very well, or so Rosalind had told her, but she managed to make it to his doorstep without accident.

When Nick opened the door, Ben started talking fast, turning out his pockets and emptying about half the contents of his rock collection onto their kitchen floor. Nick watched on fondly as he set out to make lunch for everyone. There was a good deal of clatter and conversation, but Batty felt as if someone had stuffed cotton in her ears and drizzled honey over the tongue.

Batty was sitting at the Greiger's breakfast table with carefully applied peach lip balm. She could still feel the small soft hands that held her chin as it was applied. Could still see the sugar drop eyes of the girl that applied it. Batty was pretty sure that no one, not even the moon, had such an inviting mouth.

Nick put a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in front of Batty as Ben launched into a discussion about the differences between quartz and crystal and Nick leaned back in his chair.

"And you Batty?" he asked when Ben was incapacitated by a large bite of peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his cheek. "How are you?"

She talks about the girl who can play the cello and dots her “I”s with hearts and only drinks tea sweet and Nick smiles like he knows.


	4. God Hates Flags

Chapter Four  
"God Hates Flags"

(Batty-17, Jane-23, Skye-24, Rosalind-25)

The little bar - pub might be a better word - was situated in the middle of the town. It was small and dark, and a low haze of smoke hung over everything. It smelled of bodies and alcohol. Despite all of this though, Batty supposed it had an element of charm. The owner was always playing a banjo in the corner and let her in for free if she promised him a song on the upright piano on the back wall.

Batty pushed through the backdoor of the place, which shuttered like a ghost on its old hinges before groaning and falling in. The heady smell and warmth enveloped her almost immediately, and she knocked the snow from her boots.

"You're late, he is already on," a red headed girl clutching a tambourine practically yelled over the noise, ushering her in and helping Batty up onto the makeshift stage behind the curtain.

Batty parted the heavy, waxy curtain and peeked out.

Charlie was standing on the little wooden stage in skinny jeans and high tops with a guitar over one shoulder and one hand in his curly, black hair. Batty bought him that very guitar four years prior with her dog walking money. He played every single show with it since. A crowd of people stood below him, and behind him stood his drummer and base guitarist and a myriad of amps and cords. The lights flashed in blue and red and Charlie looked almost ethereal in the light, singing into the mic and reaching down to the crowd in front of him as they reached up with eager (greedy) hands.

Batty sat down on an old kick drum turned on its side backstage and waited for the set to end and for Charlie to find her like he always did. She rested her head against the back wall and let the music swallow her whole, peeking around the curtain to watch the crowd get lost within itself.

Batty noticed a girl standing off to the side of the crowd. She had seen her before. The girl came to most of the shows, always alone and dancing as if nobody was watching. This, of course, wasn’t true - _everyone_ was watching. How could they not? She had big brown eyes and slender shoulders and cherry cough drop lips that made everyone want to kiss her. At least the boys; Batty could see it in their hungry eyes.

The girl raised her arms above her head and swayed her hips in perfect rhythm, her eyes falling shut as she did so. A few of the braver boys wandered over during the song changes and tried to whisper things into her ear, but she seemed to hardly notice them, let alone pay them any attention. In time they wandered off defeated, and the girl dissolved like a sugar cube into the music.

The set ended in a startling bass crunch and the crowd cheered. Moments later, Charlie slipped through the curtains and knelt in front of Batty, all pearl tooth smile and green eyes.

"So?"

Batty tore her eyes away form the girl and focused on his face.

"It was brilliant Charlie."

Charlie laughed and rolled his eyes, sneaking a sidelong glance at the girl leaning against the sidewall.

"You could go talk to her you know, instead of just creepily staring."

"I'm not staring."

"Like hell you aren't."

"I'm not creepy."

"Debatable."

Batty sighed and mashed the foot petal on the old kick drum.

Thump.

It rattled a bit with its age. Charlie sat a small shot glass down in front of her filled with something amber. "Liquid courage?" Batty gave him a very pointed look and he shrugged, pushing his damp hair back with one hand and shuffling a bit in his converse. "Gal from the bar gave it to me. These girls are killing us, Batty," he said with a wink.

Thump.

As if to prove his point, a group of girls came giggling and stumbling around the side of the little stage, reaching for Charlie. Batty rolled her eyes. Ever since his band had become such a local success, girls had been coming up to him asking for their palms to be kissed and for their foreheads to be signed as if he was something divine. They couldn't understand. It was the mortality about him that made Batty love him so fiercely. The sweat in his eyes, the way his body curled around the guitar...

Thump.

A pretty blonde girl pressed a sharpie into Charlie's hand and asked him to sign his name in the hollow just above her collarbone, and Batty suddenly felt very claustrophobic.

"I am going home," she announced and hopped off the drum.

Charlie, who had been laughing along with the pretty blonde and her friends, quickly jumped up and caught her wrist.

"Aw c'mon Battykins, don't go. I can ask them all to leave," he offered, even as the girls tugged at his shirt.

Batty rolled her eyes (again! she was starting to feel like Skye) and kissed his cheek. "You and I both know they are good for your publicity," she said, nodding towards the girls. She then very pointedly dumped the contents of the little shot glass into a houseplant squatting beside one of the old upright pianos backstage. After all, it was the Penderwick thing to do. She only hoped the poor plant didn't suffer from the unconventional watering. She threw her coat over her shoulders and started for the door.

"You're still my number one girl!" Charlie called.

"Don't forget it," she tossed back at him, and with a hard shove on the door, stepped back into the night and snow.

The intense absence of heat and noise was startling in comparison to the atmosphere inside the pub. The space around Batty felt almost like a vacuum, and she welcomed the lack. She trudged home through the snow by way of a shortcut, which cut back across the schoolyard and through a small stretch of Quigley Wood. The shortcut was Skye's invention and used to terrify Batty at night, but the moon was full and reflecting bright off of the snow covered ground, so her walk was pretty and well lit. She stumbled only once, in a particularly deep snowdrift, before continuing on her way. In no time, she emerged from the woods onto the cul-de-sac at the end of her street. Usually Batty would run the rest of the way home, eager to tell her father about the show and to wrap herself up in the light and warmth of her kitchen, but tonight Batty stood frozen in place at the end of the street, ankle deep in the cold snow.

Two men were standing in the street, both in uniform, both with their heads bowed. The men marched up the road in the light of the streetlamps, now casting a soft orange glow on the snow, with hard-set jaws and soft eyes that were crinkled like candy wrappers at the edges. Batty watched them come to a stop in front of the Greiger's house as if steeling themselves for what was to come. They carried with them a folded flag and a set of dog tags.

...

_Somewhere, in the middle of a snowy street, a small girl grows cold and quiet. The world around her moves in slow motion and she watches it all through the fog made by her own warm breath. The men in uniform knock on the door, their eyes trained on their combat boots._

_And she knows._

_And something, somewhere, high on the shelves of her heart, falls._

_Somewhere, in the middle of a big, big world, a small girl turns her eyes to the dark sky and whispers - says, "God hates flags."_

...

Rosalind stood behind Skye in front of the mirror, her slender fingers pulling Skye's hair back in a tight braid. They were both wearing black.

Rosalind's fingers were deftly quick, but they shook slightly, a fact that was not lost on Skye. In the mirror, Skye saw Tommy come to the doorway, dressed in a black suit and undoubtedly hiding from the visitation that was being held at the Greiger household across the street. She watched Rosalind's eyes flick up to meet Tommy's heavily in the mirror. Something thick and almost tangible passed between them in a mere look, and Skye felt an overwhelming urge to look away.

Like a ghost - perhaps a bit too much like a ghost - Tommy's dark form disappeared from the doorway and Skye looked up at Rosalind in the mirror.

Nick Greiger's absence was spread over everything, like a thin film of dust that wouldn't go away. When Skye opened her mouth to say something, say _anything_ , to Rosalind, it was like she got a mouth of the dusty stuff choking back her words. The subsequent silence was nothing new. Batty hadn't played music since that night. Rosalind moved quietly around everything, making no sound and no impact, like a haunting spirit. Jane, who returned from her travels with Noah as soon as she got the news, couldn’t even find the words. And Ben... Ben simply kept a silent watch from the front porch wearing the camouflage jacket Nick once gave him as if he was holding his own vigil for the silence.

In the end, it was Rosalind who broke the thick dark quiet, and Skye cursed the words she used to do so.

"Jeffery called for you."

"Good grief."

She didn't call him back.

...

When a small town boy came by later that day, wearing a wilted bowtie and carrying flowers, it was Skye of all people that opened the door.

_(Small town boy, you should have known better.)_

Pearson left with bloody nose part two. When Skye didn't come back inside afterwards, Jane wandered outside looking for her and shook her head at the blood on her knuckles and the blood on her black dress. She returned with a damp rag, which she pressed gingerly to the back of Skye's hand as Skye sunk to the porch steps.

They watched as people they had never seen in their whole lives hurried in and out of the Greiger household, offering flowers and condolences. Skye felt a very particular hatred for them. These people didn't really know the Greigers. They didn't know Nick.

“We have to get out of here," Skye said. "This town is full of cops with water guns and poets who don’t read. You know how I feel about phonies." The only blood on her hands now was her own.  
  
They stood there squinting at the setting sun for a long time in silence, shoulder to shoulder.  
  
“I read,” Jane said finally.  
  
Skye grinned and rolled her eyes. “I know that, doofus.”  
  
Jane shoved her playfully with her elbow and Skye shoved her back.

...

That night, Skye tiptoed downstairs in stocking feet to do some math problems in the kitchen. Under her arm she carried books full of differentiable equations and a green notebook. She found that routine helped. Having problems she could actually _solve_ , helped.

When she reached the bottom stairs, she froze. Quiet but strained whispers came from the kitchen, and Skye instinctually leaned closer to listen.

"My brother just _died_ Rosalind, do you expect me to sit idly by?"

"Why can't you stay for me?"

Skye leaned over the handrail so she could peek into the kitchen. Rosalind was standing there in the middle of the room with her arms crossed carefully in front of her. Tommy stood staring out the window, his back to Rosalind.

Batty might call her a snoop. Ben _definitely_ would. But despite the rush of guilt that came with overhearing the obviously private conversation, Skye was rooted to the spot by the growing feeling of dread in her stomach. Rosalind and Tommy were a constant thing in life. They never fought, never wavered...

"Just go."

"Rosalind."

"I don't care." 

Later, after Tommy left with a flourish and the screen door banging behind him, Skye slipped downstairs and sat at the kitchen table next to Rosalind, who had her head buried in her hands.

"Are you going to say anything?" Rosalind finally grumbled.

Skye thought about it for a minute and then shook her head. "No."

_I don't care._

Then, changing her mind, Skye whispered, "You lied."

It was the first time Skye had ever heard Rosalind tell a lie.

...

Tommy enlisted with the Army the following day. For weeks after, Rosalind wept at the door and wondered where god was in war.

 


	5. Persephone

Chapter Five

"Persephone" 

(Batty-18, Jane-24, Skye-25, Rosalind-26)

Skye took a research position at MIT and moved into a dingy apartment right in thicket of the brick buildings and streetcars of Boston. Her apartment had dark wood floors and a little creaky bed that she slept in alone. On her ceiling there were glow-in-the-dark stars, no doubt remnants of renters past. Tonight, as she sat with her notes and textbooks in a semi circle around her on the floor with nothing but a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling to light the room, those little florescent stars glowed faintly. She told herself that she would take them down soon, that they were much to childish for a twenty-five year old's bedroom, but she had lived there for months and had yet to do so. The truth was, she slept better with them there.

She was scribbling something about electron orbitals in her notebook when the old cord phone rang. She wasn't sure what convinced her to answer it. Maybe she felt a little disconnected in such a big city. Maybe she was tired of making racket that nobody seemed to hear. She picked up the phone.

"Skye!" He sounded surprised, which was funny, considering he called her.

"That's my name."

"You picked up."

"Yeah." The was a long moment where the only sound was each other's breathing, somehow still so familiar, and the static on the line.

"I, uh - how are you?"

Skye was vaguely aware of the fact that she was clutching the phone tightly enough to make her hand hurt. "I'm fine." She paused, and as an afterthought asked "you?"

"I am a mess mostly," Jeffrey said and his subsequent bark of laughter was enough to diffuse the tension on the line. Skye smiled gratefully and sagged into the phone. "I have been playing clarinet like a mad man. Carnegie one day, the Boston Symphony Hall the next.... It's crazy. And um, I got a girlfriend."

Skye feigned shock. "But Jeffrey! That would involve you knowing how to talk to a girl!"

Jeffrey made a noise of indignation and Skye laughed.

"What's her name?" Skye asked, suddenly serious.

"Sarah."

"Okay."

"Okay," he said. Then...

"I miss you, Skye."

She swallowed thickly. "Don't be gross."

"I mean it."

"I know."

...

When Batty got accepted to Juilliard, Charlie naturally tagged along. They moved into an apartment together in the Bronx where she practiced constantly and Charlie teased her and made sure she always remembered to eat. While she went to school on a full scholarship, Charlie worked odd jobs during the day, and played sets in little odd venues at night. He would tell her he could feel his big break coming, and Batty tried not to worry about him. On days when she was uninspired and Charlie was off delivering papers or making overpriced lattes, she would wander around the city, linger outside of concert halls and jazz clubs.

One cold fall night she was doing just that, lingering outside of a jazz club where a complete brass band was in full swing downstairs. She had begged the man at the door to let her in for the music, but he firmly refused to allow anyone under twenty-one into the club. And so she lingered, kicking at leaves that rattled like bones against the pavement and clinging to a cup of coffee for warmth. She was busy counting off the measures of the jazzy music floating up from the bar when a man with dark hair and a dark trench coat bustled out the door and fell into step in front of her on the sidewalk. He carried at his side a clarinet case.

She couldn't tell you what it was about the man that possessed her to follow him. Perhaps it was the familiarity in the stride. Perhaps it was the bit of frustration she was harboring for the scary looking bouncer at the door. Either way, she followed the man for a long while until she found herself on Seventh Avenue, Carnegie Hall looming across the street. The man with the clarinet swiftly cut across the street and ducked into the alleyway behind the music hall, and Batty followed blindly. When she reached the dark ally, she caught the briefest look of the man as he was disappearing into a side door, and could have sworn the man's eyes were the exact shade of jade as Jeffrey's.

The color was startling enough to wake her up from her trance-like state and she lurched forward after him. "Jeffrey?" she called. Running now, the frost encrusted sidewalk slick beneath her feet. "Jeffrey!" She got to the door and was surprised to find herself face to face with a heavyset guard instead of the slender clarinet man.

"Oh!" she squeaked. To her credit, the guard seemed just as surprised to see her.

"Um, you can't be here, miss." He had a thick Italian accent.

"Please, I think I know that man."

Suddenly music began to pour through the doorway, from deep inside the belly of the warmly lit building out onto the cold streets of New York. Batty sagged forward, pulled toward the music almost against her will, and caught herself against the doorjamb.

The guard was ruffled. "You, um," he cleared his throat. "Big fan of music, huh?"

Batty looked up at him. The man seemed almost scared of her, despite being easily three times her size. She realized then how positively loony she must look, chasing after a man she mostly likely doesn't know and being pulled towards the music as if she were possessed by it. A bubble of laughter tickled up her throat, and suddenly she was overcome with it. The man, looking confused but largely relieved, laughed with her.

"I must look insane," she said, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve.

The man produced a kerchief and handed it to her. Batty thought it looked funny and delicate in his large, ruddy hands. "Thank you," she said, gratefully.

"Of course. Listen I, uh - if you wanna go in, I'll let ya. Be quiet though, you hear? The main hall is the third door on the left."

And Batty did, slipping inside the third door on her left and finding herself behind a huge stage. Backstage was dark and crowded with instrument cases, lurking like human figures in the dark corners. A grand piano caught the few shafts of light that slipped through the dark red velvet curtains and reflected it off its shiny black surface. Batty lingered in the shadows and peeked out behind the curtains onto the grand stage, where two men in dark suits stood, playing for an empty hall. The music was echoing and haunting.

One man was sitting and holding a cello. The other was playing the most beautiful clarinet piece she had ever heard. Something about the way he played was heartbreakingly familiar. She knew in an instant who those delicate fingers belonged to, and wondered just when she lost the ability to pick him out with certainty on the street. It had been so long.

She never said hello, simply left when the song ended and went home. Something about idea of talking to him felt wrong, the way one might feel addressing their shadow.

Now, on days when she felt particularly uninspired, she would pick up coffee and donuts for the guard at the door and hide herself in the curtains behind the stage, losing herself to the music. The dark velvet curtains would hang heavy around her shoulders like a cape, and the grand hall would echo and the chandelier would drip gold and light.

Jeffery never returned, but Batty felt like a kid again.

...

Three days into October, Skye followed the address he left on her voicemail to a little apartment on the edge of the city. She brought six oranges as a peace offering, because that seemed hospitable and adult-ish. As she ascended five flights of dingy concrete stairs to his apartment door, Skye began to resent the stupid, fragrant fruits.

"Skye! I'm glad you came."

A beat passed.

"And you brought oranges?" Jeffrey grinned kindly.

Skye huffed and pushed her way past him and into his apartment.

"Dumb, right? I brought oranges! Like _that's_ going to help..." she gestured wildly at the space between them. "I don't know!" Skye kicked at the air. "Stupid," she muttered. "Stupid, stupid, stupid."

Jeffrey reached out and put his hands on her shoulders, successfully stopping her flow of words.

"Skye. It's okay. I _like_ oranges."

Skye blinked, then laughed despite herself.

"Well. Thank god."

The room felt too small for the two of them, and so they sat out on the fire escape.

The day was cold and bright, like each new orange they peeled. They watched as people below them tucked scarves under their chins and bustled around, and watched as leaves, crunchy and brown, rattled down the sidewalks. Jeffrey pointed out a young woman, dressed in a green skirt and carrying a violin case. "She probably plays wonderful waltzes," he said. Skye rolled her eyes and pointed out an old man with wild, white hair. She said he looked like Einstein, and probably thought beautifully complex thoughts. Jeffrey liked that. Skye watched as Jeffrey worked his fingers, delicate as always, under the orange skins, tearing away the rough outside to get to the fleshy fruit. When Skye did the same, she flicked the little peices of skin at Jeffrey, and they both laughed like they'd never been lonely.

So they sat on the fire escape, and the irony was not lost on Skye. She was sitting there with him like she had run naked from the fire inside, only to find she had taken the burning thing out with her. Jeffrey turned his head towards the horizon and tipped his chin toward the dying sun, lighting his face in fleeting gold and red. She had gotten good at ignoring the low heat of the thing. The gnawing desperation, something like fear, or desire maybe. But the canary was lying dead in the pit of her stomach. They say that more often than not, it’s the smoke that gets you first.

So maybe this is hell, dark, and firey, and beautiful. So maybe this is hell and Hades is covered in orange peels and Persephone is laughing in the corner, the sweet flesh of the fruit in her left side cheek.

There are two sides to this story. Persephone eats her fill and licks the orange juice languidly off her fingers but she keeps a dagger under her dress and against her thigh ( _just in case_ she says, _these corners get so dark_ ). Persephone waits for spring and wraps her arms around herself when the nights get cold. Hades watches her toss orange peels at him with barely concealed amusement. This is what it’s like to love a girl that doesn’t want to stay and sleeps firmly on her side of the bed. He has seen the dagger, he's no fool. The thing is, he would let her kill him, time and time again, if thats what it took for her to really see him.

"I missed this," Skye said, once the oranges were gone. She licked a spot of sticky ornage juice from her thumb. Jeffrey thought she looked eleven years old again.

“Have I regained my best friend status?” he asked. Skye spit an orange seed into her palm, looking contemplative and pretending to really mull it over. “Oh c’mon!” he said finally, and she laughed. “As if you ever lost it.”

"I'm going to marry her," he said suddenly, but slowly. Jeffrey watched as Skye grew very still. He would never know what possessed him to say this to her in that moment.

"Who?"

"Sarah."

"Oh. Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah."

...

_And so Persephone never learns how to trust, and Hades never learns the art of unloving. Dear reader, isn't this how all the great mythologies go?_

...

Skye threw herself into her studies, because that was all she ever knew how to do. She wrote a thesis in physics, specifically on the concept of entropy. She spent countless hours at the campus planetarium, replaying old tapes of universe expansion and star explosions.

One Friday night, when all of the other twenty-somethings were off getting drunk in bars and kissing the mouths of strangers, Skye waited in the lobby of the planetarium. Families shuffled in and out of the weekly planetarium shows talking animatedly about the constellations, and Skye couldn't help but feel a little nostalgic. There was a day when her father took her to the very same shows, and they would sit in the dark together, watching the dome and counting stars before the show started. Skye didn't let herself dwell on much, but she let herself linger on this, turning over the bittersweet memory in her mouth.

Once the planetarium was vacated, Skye slipped into the equipment booth and put in the tape with her favorite show (one on dark matter, narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson). She wandered to the middle of the dome, which she now had all to herself, and laid down on the carpeted floor, looking up at the starry ceiling.

"Excuse me, ma'am." One of the researchers that helped with the shows was standing in the doorway, a silhouette backlit with yellow light. Skye recognized him as they guy that did the more complex show on astronomical physics. "Do you have clearance to be in here?"

"Yeah," she said. "I got it." She waved around a little plastic card that said "Researcher" at the top with her name and a god-awful picture of her on it.

"Okay." He hesitated for a moment at the door. "What are you doing?"

Skye rolled her eyes. "Dissolving." She had meant to sound more sarcastic than she did.

"Oh."

The light from the door disappeared, and assuming he was gone, Skye retrained her eyes on the stars above her. A long, quiet moment passed. Then suddenly, Skye felt a body slide down to the floor next to hers. "Mind if I dissolve with you?"

And that's how Skye met a boy named August in the middle of December - begrudgingly, but with a hit of relief to no longer be alone. She knew that laying in the dark there with him wouldn't fix a thing, but it felt like maybe it could. That night she dug out her science journal for the first time in months and wrote:

Entropy: a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

She underlined in blue ink for emphasis. Even the messiest of things are quantifiable.

...

Jane moved to France because _"I'm twenty-four for god's sake!"_ and read big books written by pre-twentieth century writers who all confused love with lust. Called Skye in panic about the life line on her palm that appeared to be cut short and hung up when Skye tried to calm her down with an explanation of entropy (with the expanding randomness in the universe the probability of a correlation between palm lines and longevity of life is improbable, you see). She kissed a man on the street and when he asked for her number, she wrote the number of her high school soccer jersey (lucky number seven) on the back of his hand and left him there, standing on the sidewalk. When she called Skye on the phone later that night to tell her about the man on the sidewalk, Skye found this hilarious and complimented her profusely.

...

Skye wouldn't call it a "date" _per say_. Rosalind did. And Jane. Even little Batty betrayed her and called it - that. It wasn't a date.

It was a movie. And dinner. And a broken down car halfway home.

August apologised profusely for the malfunction of his old Buick and Skye just laughed. The stars were out. She liked walking better anyway.

"I had a really nice time," August said.

"Me too."

“But..." He drew out the word like it was elastic and might come snapping back at him. "You aren’t interested in more.” It’s not a question, simply an observation.

“I'm no good at this.”

“No shit,” he said. Skye whipped her head around to look at him accusingly, but his laughing eyes told her that it was merely a joke. She felt her shoulders relax and Skye Penderwick laughed despite herself, the feeling odd and bubbling. He shoved his hands in his pockets and they walked a little further.

“Someday,” he said, “somebody is going to come around with the audacity to love you unapologetically. What then?”

“I should hope for his sake he learns better very quickly.” (She didn’t think his name. She _didn't_.)

“I hope for your sake he never learns.” Skye punched his shoulder and he laughed, deep and grumbling.

“I wonder what it would feel like to be loved by someone like you.”

"Terrible, probably."

August grinned and turned around to face her, walking backward with ease."Devastating, most likely," he countered.

"Gut wrenching!" Skye said.

"Life wrecking!"

Skye laughed. "Now that's just harsh."

 


	6. Picasso Among Other Things

Chapter Six  
"Picasso Among Other Things"

(Batty-19, Jane-25, Skye-26, Rosalind-27)

_Martin hummed as he sautéed asparagus on the little stovetop. He wasn't much of a cook, but he liked to try, especially on nights when Elizabeth had to work late and could use a pick-me-up._

_In a sudden cacophony of sound and movement, the front door of their apartment opened, Elizabeth bustled in and called out his name, and the oven timer dinged, making Martin jump and bump his head ungracefully against the kitchen counter. Elizabeth insisted that the tiny kitchen was cute. He supposed it had a sort of antiqued charm to it, but recently he was itching for more space. A house, maybe. He decided he'd pitch the idea to Elizabeth later._

_"Hello, darling," Elizabeth said, sweeping into the kitchen. Her hair was frizzy and her red lipstick smudged from a day of worrying at her bottom lip. She looked entirely crazy and beautiful._

_"Lizzy!" he said, happily. He opened the oven. "Just in time."_

_They ate together in the little window seat just off the kitchen. Elizabeth talked in a hushed hurry about the logistics of her most recent research project, and Martin listened fondly, doing his very best to follow. Then, when Elizabeth had shoveled too much food into her mouth to safely keep talking and Martin was finally able to get a word in, he surprised both of them._

_"Marry me."_

_"I - what?" Elizabeth froze, her forkful of asparagus suspended somewhere between her plate and her mouth._

_For Martin, it felt as though everything in the whole world had come to a point, like it were recondensing into an unimaginably heavy thing, undoing the doings of the universe. Elizabeth was always telling him how, at the center of a black hole, time stops completely. Elizabeth's hands flexed, and he was suddenly hyper aware of her breathing. He watched as bits of dust in the air caught the light streaming into the kitchen from the window, sifting slowly downward. Watched as Elizabeth opened and closed her mouth - mouth like laurel, mouth like birch, mouth like -_

_"Marry me," he whispered again._

_And when she laughed, it was the birth of something violent and strange and wildly beautiful._

_"Yes," she said, smiling widely now._

_"Yes?" he asked, feeling suddenly and aggressively present._

_"Aren't you supposed to be on one knee or something?" she teased._

_"Oh! Yes." Martin leapt from his chair and knelt down in front of her, taking both of her small hands in his large ones. "I'm afraid I haven't gotten a ring yet. I don't think I planned this out very well..."_

_Elizabeth laughed again._

_"But will you..."_

_Elizabeth smacked his shoulder, lightly._

_"Yes, you silly man. I would love to be your wife."_

_And, as they say, the rest was history. My God, you should have seen the flowers at the wedding. Dear reader, believe me when I say that botanists know how to do floral arrangements._

...

Batty spent her Sunday mornings in museums. Batty didn't particularly _like_ looking at paintings or sculptures (she much preferred music), but she liked looking at the people that wandered through the exhibits. There was the man with the mustard turtleneck and blue eye shadow who stood for hours in front of the oil pastels, the woman with white hair in the sculpture room, the tall scrawny boy with amber eyes and freckles who wandered through the modern art exhibits, and - a girl. A girl with auburn hair and green glasses, who stood next to Batty in front of a painting of a nude woman. The little plaque below the painting said that Pablo Picasso painted it during his "Rose Period." A pink blush stained Batty's cheeks when she noticed the girl beside her and the way her gaze was shifting between Batty and the painting.

"It's one of my favorites," the girl said suddenly, her eyes now fixed firmly on Batty.

Batty froze up a bit, a habit she held onto from her childhood whenever she found herself around beautiful strangers. She stared determinedly ahead at the painting.

"Why?" Batty asked finally, as she exhaled through her teeth. She allowed herself a sidelong look at the girl. Her face was pretty and open, and comfortingly interested in Batty's response to her. Naturally, it made Batty want to curl into a ball and die.

"You can see who the woman is. Her personality is everywhere. But you don't really see much of her body, you know?" The girl simultaneously stepped closer to the painting and to Batty, who was forcibly reminding herself to breathe. _Get it together, weirdo._

The girl pointed to the lower half of the woman's body, where it seemed to just fade into a warm orange and red smudge of paint. Batty, whose vision was hazy and whose fingertips had grown warm when the woman's arm brushed her own, never related more to a painting.

"God, I wish I could paint like him," the woman said finally, standing up straight again and stepping away from Batty, who was dearly missing the contact.

"You're an artist then," Batty said.

"Yes. So are you, I think. I can see it in your eyes."

"Sort of. But it's not like." she gestured around them, at the paintings and men shaped from clay.

"Show me what it's like then," the girl said, and Batty lost her breath over it.

...

Rosalind knotted her hands tightly in his hair. He tasted like toothpaste and boy and sometimes his teeth scraped over hers when they kissed. Rosalind liked that. She liked how tall he was, and the way he swung her hand a bit when they walked, and the fact that he could speak three languages. Mostly, she liked how none of him reminded her of the boy that kissed her on her front porch all those years ago.

Rosalind's cell phone rang, and she reluctantly reached for it.

"Tell me this is important," she sighed into the phone.

"Tell me you aren't making out with Beefcake," Skye retorted.

"I'm choosing to ignore that comment."

"Rosy, seriously," her tone sobered considerably. "Something's happened."

...

It was raining and Batty was in the car with a beautiful girl. A girl who didn't mind listening to the classical music radio station and laughed when Batty made little puns about music. Her laugh had a tinkling sound, like wind chimes or the bell above the door of her favorite record shop downtown. Her name was Adah, which sounded like music in itself to Batty's ears.

The guard wasn't at the door, meaning nobody would be in the great hall performing or practicing. Batty dug out a heavy black key from her coat pocket and jiggled it in the lock for a few moments before the door swung in.

"You have a personal key - to Carnegie Hall."

"Why yes, I do," Batty grinned, momentarily forgetting to be shy.

She motioned for Adah to follow her inside and out of the rain, but Adah lingered in the cool drizzle for a moment, eyeing Batty carefully.

"What's wrong?" Batty asked, reluctantly stepping back out into the rain with Adah.

"Nothing it's just - you're something else."

Batty's forehead creased in confusion. A particularly large raindrop splashed just above her right eyebrow and she thought about her mother. "But - " she paused and blinked the water from her eyes. "I'm sorry. That's nice of you to say, it's just - you don't really even know me."

"I know. It's just the way you talk about the things that you love - your sisters, music."

There was a loud clap of thunder, and she thought about her mother again. Rosalind said that their mother would always hold her sisters close during thunderstorms, insisting that thunder was merely the sound of angels bowling up in heaven. Skye always rolled her eyes when Rosalind told this particular story about their mother, arguing that their mother would never _actually_ believe in such nonsense. That she made it all up, knowing better. Rosalind would smile then and shrug as if to say, _"maybe, and maybe not."_

Batty swayed a bit closer to Adah, unsure. Adah smiled then and reached for Batty's sleeve.

"And another thing," she said. "You never told me your name."

There was another loud burst of thunder from above them, and the wind picked up, whistling around the corner of the building. According to Rosalind, her mother was always a _terrible_ bowler.

"What?" Batty asked loudly, straining to hear over the noise of the storm.

"Your name! I don't go into dark music halls with girls whose names I don't know. It's a principle thing," Adah said, smiling.

"Oh." She paused. It began to rain harder. Her mother was laughing. "It's Elizabeth," she said finally.

"Elizabeth."

_(The first time she said it, it sounded like a thousand lifetimes in Batty's ears. Dear reader, our Battykins is a goner.)_

"Yes. Can we go inside now?"

...

"Why don't you head straight for home?"

Rosalind tossed a sigh over her shoulder at her boyfriend and tossed a few tee shirts into the duffle bag open on their queen bed. "Because my _darling_ sister Jane has gone M.I.A. somewhere in Chicago to encourage _'creativity and independence in her writing.'_ Somebody has to go find her. And because we are Penderwicks. We do everything together or not at all." Rosalind threw in some socks and a rain jacket and tried not to think about the fact that Tommy wouldn't have needed her to explain that part. Tried not to think about him at all. After all, it had been years.

"Let me come."

She shook her head lightly. _Easy, Beefcake._

"You can meet me at my house when all is well. I'll send you the address and let you know if we hear anything more from the hospital."

She liked him for all the wrong reasons but was protecting her heart for all of the right ones. She supposed you had to start somewhere. And there is now and here and Rosalind had more important things to think about than boys.

...

Batty reached out and tangled her fingers carefully with Adah's before dragging her through the heavy red curtains and onto the main stage. There was a singular black, grand paino sitting in the middle of the stage. Batty sat on the bench and pulled Adah down next to her. Then, Batty began to play.

...

Last Rosalind heard, Jane was officially calling this her "blue period."

_"All the great artists have them,"_ she insisted, and, _"haven't you studied Picasso?"_

When she returned from Paris, it seemed as though she brought all of the blue evenings spent by the Seine back with her. She spoke with French dramatics and lazy hand gestures and took up painting, which according to Skye, she was absolutely rotten at. She stayed in. Wrote about the more tragic things in life, like the broken wings of bees and the family dressed in black by the water's edge. Tried to write a short story about growing up and couldn't find the words. Then, Jane got a column in the Chicago Tribune and moved to the city with two suitcases and a blue spiral bound notebook. A blue period, indeed.

When Rosalind landed in Chicago, she had no idea where to find her sister. She had left no home address, no traceable scrap of news. So Rosalind began to look around in Jane-like places.

In the book store, Rosalind asked for the girl with eyes that never seem to look right at you. An old man behind the counter nodded. “Ah,” he said, “The Woman with the Folded Arms.” He told her that she had purchased _The Bell Jar_ and ran her fingers over the back of his hand before taking the book. Rosalind thanked him and left, certain that it was Jane, certain that she wasn’t herself.

In the coffee shop, she asked for a woman who always ordered tea with milk, and a heavy set woman behind the counter said “Yes. Yes. The Melancholy Woman.”

Rosalind showed a young man her picture on the train, and he brought his fingers to his lips before saying, “Ah, The Woman with the Bangs.” Jane didn’t have bangs in the picture but Rosalind remembered Skye telling her about the fire gods hair chopping incident when they were kids and figured it was very possible that her sister was now a woman with bangs.

At the Chicago Tribune, Rosalind asked for Jane Penderwick, the columnist. When a woman in a pencil skirt insisted that they didn't have a columnist working there with that name, Rosalind bought a copy of the most recent paper on the spot. On a bench outside the building, Rosalind found a column in the literary review section titled "To Kill Boys and Mockingbirds" by M. Hart. Rosalind knew at once where her sister was.

...

A man was playing the saxophone on the sidewalk in front of the subway stop and Adah tugged at Batty's hand, urging her to cross the street so they could better hear the man. Batty wondered if there was anywhere she wouln't go for this girl.

Adah left three dollars in the tin the man had out on the pavement and, insisting that this was the best concert she ever attended, held Batty's hand as they watched him play.

"Do you ever get the feeling that you are at the center of the whole world?" Adah asked. Adah had a dreamy quality about her. Like she wasn't quite real, a mirage maybe. A little hazy around the edges, like she weren't perfectly solid. Then, she said things like this - impossibly beautful things - and it only muddled Batty's sense of reality further. Adah was peering carefully into Batty's eyes, which Batty closed on instinct.

_"What an oddly specific question,"_ Batty thought. She paused, trying to recall something she used to hear her sister say about the topic.

"Skye used to say that at the center of black hole, time stops completely," she said, remembering.

Adah laughed lightly. "And you? What do _you_ think, Elizabeth Penderwick?"

It started raining again then, just a little, and Batty suddenly understood exactly what Adah meant.

"Yes," she breathed. _"Yes, I feel like I'm at the center of universe. Yes, I think maybe we are the last two people alive when you look at me like that. Yes, oh yes."_

And Batty kissed her, carefully, there in the heart of New York and at the center of the whole world, probably. Time didn't stop. The Earth didn't start to spin backwards. But Batty was kissing a beautiful girl in the middle of a beautiful city and she finally understood why Rosalind kept Tommy's old shirts, why Skye pulled at her hair evey time Jeffrey called, why Jane could never stay still, and why her father still cried sometimes, late at night, when he thought nobody was around to hear him. Finally, she _understood._

...

There were soccer fields just outside the city limits. Chicago was still bitterly cold and cloudy, so there was but a lone person on the fields. She did indeed have bangs, clearly ones that she hastily chopped with kitchen sissors, but for all intents and purposes she looked - _herself._ Her hair was frizzy and her tongue stuck out a bit from the corner of her mouth and when her shot on goal bounced off of the crossbar she looked up at the sky and shouted "curses rain down upon this cursed left foot!" A light rain started to fall. Rosalind grinned.

"Hey, Mick Hart."

Jane turned around slowly, a small, sad smile forming on her lips when her eyes finally came to a rest on her big sister.

"Rosalind." She hurried into the open arms Rosalind had for her. They stood that way for long moments as they listened to the hum of the city behind them.

"I tried to change myself, Rosy. I tried but - I couldn't."

"I'm so glad you didn't," Rosalind mumbled into her hair.

Jane started crying a bit then. Skye would probably scold her.

"I'm so tired."

"I know. It's time to come home now. We have to go home. It's - it's Daddy."

...

Batty and Adah finally broke appart when Batty's phone rang (her ringtone was, of course, Mozart's Symphony No. 40). She lazily kissed Adah's chin before picking it up, still marveling over the softness of it all. The rain fell harder over New York. Perhaps her mother was crying.

"Batty?" Skye asked, her voice filtering down like rain through the static on the line. Batty felt Skye's voice deep within her, like something cool and slick coiling at the base of her spine. Skye, for once in her life, sounded scared.

"Skye?"

They talked in whispers for several horrible, long minutes. When Skye hung up and the call became a flat buzz, she looked apologetically at Adah. She watched the traffic lights play off of Adah's pretty face, damp with rain, and wondered if she might throw up.

"I have to go. It's my father. He's - well, I have to go. I'm sorry."

"Elizabeth," Adah grabbed her elbow, grounding her. "Let me come with you."

Batty took several deep breaths, focusing on the way Adah looked in the greenish light, then the yellow, then the red.

"Batty."

"What?"

"My name," she said, "is Batty."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: 5 points to anyone who can catch all of the Picasso references. The next chapter is my absolute favorite, so stay tuned. Also fun grammar facts! "Intensive purposes" is a common eggcorn (a phrase resulting form mishearing the actual phrase) derived from slurring "intents and purposes" together. Who knew?


	7. The Light Through the Windowpane

Chapter Seven

"The Light Through the Windowpane"

(Batty-19, Jane-25, Skye-26, Rosalind-27)

_"Do you like them?" Elizabeth asked, as she fussed with the new drapes she bought for the window over the sink. The lacy material was light enough that the drapes let light in even when they were closed, as they were now. The late August sun swung low in the sky and the light fell through the lace in shafts._

_The young couple moved into the house on Gardam Street just weeks earlier and it always seemed to be in various states of disarray. The living room was half painted and unpacked boxes cluttered the space at the base of the stairs. The crib in the room upstairs still lay unassembled. Everything smelled of dust and plaster and the geraniums that Martin cut from the garden they planted in the backyard. Martin watched the light from the window pooling around Elizabeth's shoulders like it were liquid. Chips of paint (from working in the living room, no doubt) speckled her arms, and he wanted to laugh, but she was so lovely standing there in the dying light that he couldn't._

_"You hate them, don’t you?" Elizabeth asked, worry coloring her voice when he didn't answer her question._

_"They're very pretty," he managed._

_She inhaled sharply when she turned and found him staring at her, his Adam's apple bobbing with effort. A small "oh" fell from her lips in the seconds before he kissed her. Elizabeth unfurled like a love letter that had been folded in half eight times and tucked deep in a pocket for safekeeping. Unfolded along all of the familiar creases and laughed into his mouth as she did so._

_Martin folded with her, opening and closing like the origami fortune tellers they used to make in the back of the classroom as kids (Dear reader, you know the kind. Pick a number. Pick another. Crane your neck to read your fortune. Does she love you? Does she love you?). They began to sway to an unheard rhythm. He marveled at the way they folded together - his body no longer a body in itself but an extension of another one. No longer a mere vessel for the brain (as it so often was for the likes of astrophysicists and botanists), but a glittering house of possibility, high up on the hill of love. In the house, a man and woman are dancing, and a soon-to-be baby girl thrums to life deep in the cavity of the woman's body._

_Dear reader, can you see them? A handsome young couple stumbling for the stairs, on fire, laughing in a way that only two people in love can? Look closely. Time will transcend flesh, and love will transcend time, and love will rise like a barn on fire. Can you see them?_

...

When Rosalind and Jane returned home, Jane wore yellow.

Skye opened the door for them when they finally arrived at the house on Gardam Street. Rosalind's first thought was that Skye looked older, harder somehow, and more settled. Smooth where she used to be all sharp edges. Her blue eyes betrayed her though, flashing something terribly young and terrified and reckless. Rosalind gathered her into a hug and Skye stiffened instinctively, though she was privately relieved to no longer be the OAP. When Rosalind pulled away from Skye, she found that Jane had already slipped past her and into the house, undoubtedly looking for their father.

"How is he?" she asked Skye, and they moved inside. The familiarity of the house was more unsettling than comforting, and Rosalind reached out to grab onto her sister's arm. As they walked towards the study, Skye talked in a low whisper about their father's possible paralysis and apparent speech impediment as a result of the stroke.

When they reached the study and peered inside they were surprised to find Jane already there, sitting cross-legged in front of their father, who sat slumped slightly in his wheel chair. She was reading from his worn copy of _Plant Identification Terminology,_ first pronouncing the words slowly in English, then in Latin.  Rosalind paused at the door and Skye leaned into her just slightly, a rare show of a physical need for comfort.

"Wild radish," Jane said slowly, tucking her bare feet underneath her and peering up at her father.

" _Raphanus sativus_ ," their father said, slowly and with much effort.

Jane looked over at her sisters huddled in the doorway and grinned. As the days passed, they found that while their father still slurred some of his words in English, he spoke perfect Latin.

...

Batty got home a day later on a cheap red-eye flight, holding a stack of sheet music and another girl's hand. When Skye opened the door for them, she wore a dumb little grin as if she'd seen this coming since Batty was eleven years old and standing in the schoolyard with a bloodied lip.

"Skye. Hi," Batty said. She was almost surprised to see Skye standing there, all flesh and bone and standing in the doorway of their childhood home. It had been almost a year since she had seen her sisters last. She moved as if to hug Skye and then thought better of it, remembering which sister she was dealing with.

"This is Adah. She's my, uh..." Batty looked shyly over at Adah and smiled.

"... your girlfriend?" Skye helpfully supplied. She stuck out a hand and shook Adah's. Batty blushed fiercely and nodded.

"Skye's the smart sister."

"And I'm the creative one!" Jane chimed in from back inside the house.

"And I," Rosalind interjected, "am, at the very least, the polite one." She hip checked Skye out of the doorway so that Adah and Batty could get inside without further interrogation, at once wrapping Batty into the hug that she so desperately needed.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Adah. We've heard very good things," Rosalind said, hugging her as well.

"Have you now?" Adah asked, a teasing edge in her voice as she grinned over at Batty.

Batty looked positively mortified, blushing like she did when she was five-years-old and ducking her head.

Iantha was facing away from them as they walked into the kitchen, as was their father's wheelchair. Iantha was standing at the kitchen sink, dunking a mixing bowl in warm, soapy water and peering through the lace window drapes out onto the backyard. Iantha was beautiful in the late summer light, and their father watched her move, clearly less coordinated after the stroke but still very much in love.

"Daddy," Batty breathed, and rushed forward.

Iantha turned, smiled, and then turned the wheelchair as well. Batty was kneeling in front of her father at once, her small hands running along his jawline and chin, as if marveling at his flesh and bone. The light that fell through the lace in front of the window illuminated features of his face that Batty had missed over the past few years. She ran her fingers over the deep creases by his eyes and the greying hairs on his chin, and thanked her lucky stars that he was alive and well. Mr. Penderwick didn't talk much, but he smiled when Batty introduced him to Adah.

The kitchen quickly dissolved into warm chaos, which was inevitable given the sheer number of happy people packed into one room. Ben stood at the counter mixing cake ingredients in a bowl too quickly, and little bits of batter flew out onto the floor where Sonata and Feldspar were eagerly licking them up. Charlie was there, sitting on the adjacent countertop with his long legs and old converse pulled up underneath him. He was licking a spoon covered in something chocolaty and winked at Batty, who was once again holding tight to Adah's hand.

"Have you finally replaced me?" he asked, laughing.

August, who was sitting at the table carefully frosting a cake, threw a pointed look at Charlie. "Better get used to it if you want to love a Penderwick girl."

Skye smacked him and then smacked Charlie too, for good measure. Lydia ambled into the room upon hearing the commotion, her hands shoved deep into her pockets and her Red Sox baseball hat turned backwards on her head. Lydia was arguably more of a tomboy than Skye now, and it was an evolution that nobody saw coming. All five sisters hugged then, marveling over the fact that they were all together again, something that didn't even always happen on the holidays. They pulled a protesting Ben into the mix for good measure. A knock at the door pulled them apart.

"That would be Jamison," Rosalind said. The timer on the oven went off, and Rosalind looked woefully between the front door and oven.

"You get the cake, I'll get the boy," Skye said, as she moved toward the hall.

"Hey Beefcake," Skye greeted him at the door.

"Hey Brainiac, where's your sister?"

"Kitchen," Skye answered.

As far as boyfriends go, Jamison was fine. He was smart and handsome and never made any of the Penderwicks cry. Of course, it bothered Skye that he went by Jamison (just go by James, for crying out loud!) and that he would kiss Rosalind flush against the mouth in front of her (on the list of things that Skye would like to see - the surface of Mars being at the top of the list - a boy roughly kissing her sister was at the bottom). Nevertheless, he was _fine_.

When Jamison moved into the house, Skye noticed a second boy standing behind him, wearing a full suit and wringing his hands.

"Skye," he said.

"Jeffrey."

_Dear reader, come close. Ghosts haunt this place. Can you see them? Can you see them?_

...

Jeffrey stuck around just long enough to say hello to "Mr. Pen" and eat more than his fair share of cake. He had a concert to get to, after all.

Rosalind eventually shooed everyone who wasn't helping with the dishes outside, which meant that Skye slunk to the porch with her cake and Lydia dragged Adah and the boys into the street to toss a football with her. Batty, woefully uninterested in sports, joined Skye on the front porch. They watched from their perch on the porch railing as Lydia and Adah teamed up to make the boys look foolish with a football.

"What's she like?" Skye asked Batty, nodding in Adah's direction and looking unsure of herself, the way she always had when it was just her and Batty alone.

Batty looked wearily over at Skye, and then at the woman playing with her younger sister in the street. She thought about Adah. Thought about her peach lipstick and brown mascara and the way she carried clementines around in her pockets. Thought about last night, when they went out to dinner after their trip to Carnegie Hall and Adah invited the taxi driver to join them (an offer that he politely, bewilderedly, declined). Adah wore dirty white sneakers under her dress with her name written inside in red sharpie and sat with Batty in the dark, listening to Batty talk about plants and about her father. Adah tasted like copper and something sweeter, like crushed almonds. Adah had a tattoo of a crescent moon on her inner thigh. Adah filled the bathtub up with milk and honey in the morning and held her breath under the opaque water for long minutes at a time and insisted that they take the shortcut through the cemetery on their way to the airport. 

"Earth to Batty." Skye waved her hand in front of Batty's face.

"She reminds me of you," Batty said finally. "And Jane. And Rosalind."

Skye raised her eyebrows, amused. "So she's... bossy, loony, and boring?"

Batty laughed and shook her head. _"Smart, creative, and kind,"_ thought Batty, though she didn't bother correcting Skye out loud. Skye knew what she meant. They sat in silence for several lazy minutes.

"Good of Jeffrey to come by," Batty noted.

Skye rolled her eyes and stuffed a large bite of cake in her mouth.

"He has always been good."

“Maybe you should marry him,” Batty said, laughing lightly.

Skye couldn't quite figure out what Batty was trying to get at. The way she said it, you might think she had been joking, only her grin didn't quite reach her eyes.

“Ew, no,” Skye said.

"Ew?" Batty mocked. "I swear to god you act like the younger sister sometimes." Skye made a face at her and Batty raised her eyebrows as if to say, _case and point_.

"Maybe _I_ should marry him,” Batty said, trying and failing to wink.

The twinkle in her eye reminded Skye of when they were kids. It was the same look Batty used to get when she and her sisters were getting away with one of their grand schemes. Batty was _definitely_ joking now. Skye groaned and shoveled more cake into her mouth.

“Shut up. You already have a girlfriend. So does he." Her words were muffled slightly by the lump of cake in her cheek.

"Oh," Batty said, suddenly looking uncomfortable. "Nobody told you..."

"Told me what?"

Batty looked away, swallowing hard. Skye felt as though the entirety of her lower digestive tract had been pushed up into her throat. There was a simultaneous feeling of emptiness settling in her stomach and uncomfortable fullness in her chest. She teetered unsteadily on the porch railing for a moment and then grabbed Batty's arm, her fingernails digging little half-moon crescents into her sister's skin. Batty winced and Adah threw a weary glance toward the pair from where she stood in the road.

"Batty, I swear to god I'll..."

"Skye, they broke up months ago."

...

The sisters stayed at the house on Gardam Street for several days after, all reluctant to leave their father and each other, wary of how long it would be before they were all back together again. Charlie, August, Adah, and Jamison floated in and out of the house periodically, checking in and occasionally spending the night in the company of the Penderwick family.

Late on a particularly hot July night, Batty climbed the stairs quietly to find Rosalind standing in the doorway of her old bedroom. Batty, finally tall enough to reach Rosalind's shoulder, rested her chin there and wrapped her arms around Rosalind's middle, peering over her and into the bedroom. It was a time capsule of sorts, the one bedroom in the house where all of the childhood things hadn't been packed into boxes and replaced with teenager's things to accommodate for Ben and Lydia. There was still a picture of their mother on Rosalind's side table, a light pink duvet cover on the bed, and a row of dusty Latin books on the shelf. In her bed, slept a man whom Rosalind loved for all of the wrong reasons. He slept soundly and handsomely. Rosalind sighed.

"I've fallen in love with a man that looks out of place in my childhood bedroom," she whispered.

Batty hummed softly in her ear.

"And is that really love at all?" Rosalind asked.

...

Skye tried calling Jeffrey but the line was busy.

Tried calling god but the line was busy.

...

Rosalind sent Jamison home the following day, with her pretty mouth all turned down in a gentle, sad frown. Days later, a boy showed up in the yard, wearing civilians’ clothes (well, a Patriots jersey) and a careful smile.

"Rosalind?" her father asked her from the front door, where they both stood, shoulder to shoulder, squinting in the afternoon sun.

"Daddy?" Rosalind was looking down the street like she'd seen a ghost.

"I know my head's gotten a bit scrambled lately, but I do believe I know that man down there."

Rosalind stepped outside, looking angelic and hazy in the late summer light. Tommy shoved his hands deep into his pockets and shuffled his feet in the grass, looking hopeful. Rosalind smiled. "Yeah Daddy, I guess you do."

...

Jane stayed at the Penderwick household for weeks after their father's stoke, slowly teaching him to speak again by reading him poetry (her choice) and ecology textbooks (his choice). Late one evening, her and her father sat in the kitchen, reading in the last few minutes of daylight before the sun set over the backyard.

Jane never looked as much like her mother as Skye did, but there were moments where Martin was stuck by a few of the more prominent similarities. Like when she turned her head just so and the late afternoon sun caught her jaw or when she squinted a bit to read in the dim light.

It was Jane's turn to choose what they read, so they sat together as she read aloud from her worn copy of "Crush" by Richard Siken. He was supposed to mouth along with her as she read and practice forming the words, new and strange in his mouth like they might be in the mouth of a child. But as Jane read on, Martin grew quiet and pensive, staring past those yellowing lace drapes by the window.

"Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means we’re inconsolable," Jane read. "Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light."

The sun sunk brilliantly over the horizon, leaving them at once in a sort of dim that was much too dark to read by. Jane finished the poem from memory.

"Tell me we’ll never get used to it."


	8. Lover is Childlike

Chapter Eight

"Lover is Childlike"

(Batty-21, Jane-27, Skye-27 (almost 28), Rosalind-29)

_"Martin?"_

_"Yes, my love?"_

_"What's the next step?"_

_"Oh well, let's see here..." Martin shifted baby Rosy to his other hip and squinted at the assembly directions for the crib. "Ah, okay. Well, you will need a wrench of some sort - I suppose that's a wrench - and, um."_

_Elizabeth surprised him then with a sudden peck on his lips. Martin blinked and then smiled slowly, even as Elizabeth eased the directions from his hands._

_"I'm afraid I'm quite useless with things like that. Far too many diagrams. And numbers," he shuddered, and Elizabeth laughed, selecting the pliers from the toolbox._

_"What would you do without me?" she asked, playfully, flirtatiously._

_Martin sunk down to the floor and laid Rosalind down in front of him on a blanket. The sun coming from the big window made Rosy's big brown eyes shine. She gurgled happily and tried to chew on Martin's finger._

_"I don't know," he answered honestly. "I would certainly be crib-less though."_

_Elizabeth laughed again and reached for the wrench this time, screwing the last safety bar into place. She sat down next to him and gently poked baby Rosalind in the tummy, making her laugh._

_"I'll teach her how to use tools," Elizabeth said._

_"I'll teach her Latin and how to grow perfect tomatoes in the garden."_

_"The dream team," Elizabeth said. She lied down next to Rosalind on the hardwood floor and Martin followed suit, lying down on the other side of his daughter. The three of them laid there for a long time, until their puppy, a rambunctious black Labrador who, in their indecisiveness on naming him was sort of accidentally named "Hound," found them. Eagerly, Hound licked the side of Martin's face, then Elizabeth's, and gleefully shouting they both hopped up with Rosalind in their arms._

_"Hound!" Elizabeth laughed._

_"Down, demon dog," Martin said affectionately, reaching down to rub behind his ears._

_Ah yes, a dream team indeed._

...

In all of Skye's frustration, she had a stroke of brilliance. Which, she reflected, was quite out of the ordinary. Usually, Skye's infamous temper led to little more than poor decisions. This time was a welcome change.

It wasn't a usual Skye Penderwick stroke of genius either, like the time she managed to solve one of math's "unsolvable problems," or the time she taught herself differential calculus in the ninth grade, or even the time she convinced Jane to switch homework assignments with her in middle school. In the midst of her intense study into black holes, Skye stumbled upon the secret to one of physics’ most perplexing problems, managing to unify both string and quantum theory.

_(Dear reader, I'll spare you the tedious science behind this.)_

In Jane's words, it was like "the eureka moment for Archimedes or the apple moment for Newton!" Both of which were likely hogwash, but Skye accepted the compliment.

Apparently, the scientific community agreed with Jane. A year after Skye published her "Theory of Everything," she won the noble prize in physics, making her the second youngest person ever to do so at the age of twenty-seven. 

When Skye gave her acceptance speech for the award her whole family was there, along with August, Charlie, Adah, and Tommy. They cheered like they were at a soccer game when she took the stage, and Skye rolled her eyes at them. Jeffrey was there too, hiding in the back of the auditorium, looking out of place in the room of dapper looking scientists in his jeans and band tee shirt. When Skye took the stage, looking wild and gangly and unassumingly gorgeous in her black dress (that Jane undoubtedly wrangled her into), the young scientists around him practically drooled over her.

“She is something else, huh?” a young guy standing next to Jeffrey muttered.

Jeffrey scoffed and folded his arms over his chest. Up on that stage, rambling about planetary orbits and dark matter, Skye looked like the messiah of modern astronomy. A Joan of Arc figure with whisperings of all the greats – Copernicus, Galileo, Hubble, Hawking - in her ear. Everyone in the room that day could see that. But Jeffrey - Jeffrey saw the little girl with wild eyes and a camo hat laughing up at the sky. Less divine, more childlike, always laughing something about solar eclipses and lunar cycles.

When her speech was over and the auditorium emptied into a lobby full of cocktails and finger sandwiches, Jeffrey attempted to slip out of the side door without notice.

"Going so soon?" He turned to find Skye's piercing blue gaze on him.

“I had to come. I have been predicting this since we were eleven years old.”

"I am glad you did.”

From behind them, an overly eager twenty-something in an awkwardly large suit was pushing through the crowd and calling Skye's name, trying to get her attention. He had a pair of huge glasses slipping down his nose.

"You have quite the fan base," Jeffrey noted.

"I don't even know that guy," Skye said, miserably.

Jeffrey laughed and regarded Skye for a moment.

"You wanna get out of here?"

"Please."

Skye and Jeffrey found themselves at a pizza place down the street with a smoky, dark interior. They ordered a pizza for the two of them, and Jeffrey ordered them a round of beers to celebrate Skye's Nobel Prize, which sat in its velvety box at the end of the greasy table. The sleek little box looked almost as out of place in the grungy pizza parlor as Skye herself did, with her pearly black dress and golden hair. The juxtaposition made Jeffrey laugh, which in turn made Skye laugh, which made her dribble hot grease down the front of the dress. This of course, just made the two of them laugh harder.

"Thank god," Skye groaned. "Now I have an excuse to never wear this thing ever again."

"I think the grease in a nice touch," Jeffrey said, and Skye lobbed a piece of peperone at him.

Jeffrey snatched it up from where it landed with a plunk on the table and popped it in his mouth, earning an embarrassingly girlish yelp from Skye. Her cheeks flushed pink and she narrowed her eyes at him while he laughed. Despite Skye's occasionally brutish ways, even she wouldn't stoop so low.

"You're gross."

"You love me," he said, and leaned forward on his elbows.

Skye smiled and shook her head, picking at the label on her beer. When she looked back up, Jeffrey was looking at her with wide eyes and a careful sort of curiosity. Skye knew that look; Jeffrey wanted badly to kiss her. A sort of sweet nostalgia settled in her chest, pressing down on her stomach and up into her throat, threatening to burst. He looked so _young_ , looking at her like that, that Skye almost didn't mind.

She leaned back in the booth and sipped at her beer. Strangers hurried past the window in drab winter clothing. The cooks yelled orders from behind the counter. The familiar din of restaurant sounds filled up the air around them with an unintelligible buzz. Grease ran down Skye's chin again, and Jeffrey laughed. He looked happy, and Skye felt happy, and she found it all to be disgustingly sweet.

"Shut up," she said, to no one in particular. Jeffrey laughed again.

The sky outside grew darker with storm clouds, the people in the window hurried on, and the hours slid by the way hours tend to do with old friends. In Skye's memory of this day, many years down the road, everything would be warm and blurry. And who's to say why? Maybe it was the beer to blame, or eventually Skye's own old age. Either way, the memory of this day would be softened with a sort of heavy, warm quality to it. She would remember the two of them laughing, stumbling out onto the wet streets of New York and reaching liberally for each other - tugging on each other's jacket sleeves and waistbands.

_Now dear reader - look._

Skye was clinging to Jeffrey's sleeve with one hand and cradling her Nobel Prize close to her body with the other. The sky was now positively menacing, and big, fat raindrops began to fall, freckling the sidewalk with brown spots. Skye produced a flimsy red umbrella from her bag just as the rain began to pick up with a vengeance. There was something festive and childlike about the two of them, standing on the sidewalk as people streamed around them, struggling with the umbrella in the pouring rain, gleefully shouting as they did so.

_Can you see them? A little drunk maybe, and fearfully in love._

As Skye continued her battle with the cheap umbrella, Jeffrey hurried to the curb to hail a taxi for her. He walked backwards beside the curb with a hand in the air, the rain soaking his shirt and the bottom of his pant legs.

"Watch it!" he yelped, as taxis popped their lights off and sped past the pair on the side of the road, splashing dirty water up onto the sidewalk. Skye laughed at Jeffrey as he hopped out of the way of the dirty spray just in time.

"Here!" he said, waving Skye over as a taxi sped to a stop at the curb in front of them.

Jeffrey opened the cab door and turned to face Skye.

"It was good seeing you again," he said, smiling.

"Yeah, yeah," Skye rolled her eyes playfully. "Of course it was. Now move."

She hip checked him out of the way and slid into the cab, pushing her wet hair out of her face and tossing her award into her seat next to her. She told the cabbie her hotel address and then, almost as an afterthought, chanced a glance toward Jeffrey who still stood in the open door of the cab, getting soaked.

"Oh," Skye said, as if surprised to see him still standing there. Quickly, she jumped from the cab and pressed the half-closed umbrella into Jeffrey's hand.

"You'll be needing this more than me now I guess," she said.

She looked up at him for a second, as if making a decision. Then, Skye swooped up onto her tiptoes and kissed him, full on the mouth. For a terrifying moment, Jeffrey froze, his lips unmoving against hers, and Skye wondered if she had read the situation horribly, horribly wrong. Then, Jeffrey melted into her, like something entirely too soft. She surged up toward his mouth, gripping at the damp, scratchy lapels of his jacket and pressing into him. And then it was over, with a “pop” and a sudden loss of contact. Skye paused for a fraction of a second as if gauging his reaction and then nodded confidently, resolutely.

"Goodbye, Jeffrey."

Jeffrey blinked, and then a small smile spread over his features. "Goodbye, Skye," he laughed, even as she retreated into the cab.

She cabbie started to pull away and Skye looked out at the boy on the sidewalk, holding a red umbrella at his side uselessly. She unrolled the window a crack.

"Goodbye!" she shouted again. Jeffrey grinned and waved dramatically.

"Goodbye!"

"Hey!" the cabbie, muttered, turning around in his seat and scolding Skye about the rain coming in through the open window.

"Sorry." She rolled the window up and smiled privately to herself, resting her head against the cracked vinyl of the door. The boy with the red umbrella slowly disappeared from view, and Skye watched as the buildings sped past the window in a blur, and people ducked from awning to awning, and the rain fell callously over everything.

...

Skye called August.

"Gus? I kissed him."

August laughed.

"Finally."

Jeffrey called too, but Skye didn't answer. It wasn't that she didn't want to answer, far from it, but Skye needed desperately to _think._ She let the call go to voicemail, and the one after that. Jeffrey didn’t call again.

And for a while, it seemed, that was that.

...

Skye was driving down a narrow, wooded road. Beside her in the passenger seat was a hastily packed overnight bag. She was driving to Jane's new house to spend the weekend with her sisters. They hadn't been together for a long time, not since their father's stroke, and Rosalind lazily called for a MOPS in order to get them all in the same place again. Skye wasn't planning on attending. After all, she had scientific conferences to attend and papers to peer review. But MOPS were like a sacred unbreakable promise to always be there, so at the last minute Skye threw some clothes in a bag and got in her car.

Jane lived in a big, yellow Victorian on the coast of Maine with white shutters and a drooping wraparound porch. Shady Hemlocks crowded the house, and beneath them crouched several hand-painted beehives. The only reason that Jane could afford it on writer’s pay was because of the rumors that the old man who built the place had died in the upstairs bedroom. If Skye had to guess though, she would guess that Jane bought the house for that very reason, instead of in spite of it. Rosalind's old red Volvo was already parked on the road out front.

When Skye pulled into the gravel driveway, Jane bumbled out of the house wearing a gauzy white beekeeper's mask and khaki shorts. When they hugged, she smelled like dirt and honey.

_Jane. Lovely Jane. Tragic Jane. Plain Jane who is anything but plain. You thinker of exquisite thoughts._

Skye thought that Jane somehow looked the same and different all at once. Her eyes had become distant and unheeding, and yet they still gleamed with something terribly inviting, promising thousands of new worlds within them.

Sabrina Star had become a New York Times Best Seller almost instantly, selling nearly 15,000 copies in first week. Jane seemed to be at a press conference almost every other day and she was quite busy basking in the newfound fame of it all. When Marvel bought the rights from her for the movie, Jane stepped back. Now Jane lived alone and spent her afternoons tending to her bees. When she wasn't beekeeping, she was writing a series of novels about four sisters growing up in the foothills of the Berkshires. Skye read them in the back of scientific meetings and at physics presentations that she never paid any attention to. If she found them to be curiously familiar, she didn't mention it to Jane. 

Batty arrived shortly thereafter; dragging a suitcase that was bigger than her, face flush with effort. Rosalind floated out of the kitchen to greet them both. She had flour in her hair. That night, Rosy baked and Batty helped and Skye and Jane sat out on the back porch, catching up.

Skye picked at an old mosquito scab and stared out at the quiet little inlet that the house was built on, all smooth water and quiet pines. It reminded her of Point Mouette. She thought about the moose and about Jeffrey. About his bare feet and summer freckles. "Don't you ever get lonely out here?" Skye asked. She had grown so used to the emergency that was life in the city that the slow pace of coastal life was making her anxious.

"I'm not any more lonely than you are," Jane insisted.

"I'm not-"

"Besides," Jane cut her off. "I find these little guys to be wonderful company." Skye watched as a bee crawled into Jane's outstretched palm. She looked like a goddess.

They ate Jane's honey and Rosalind's biscuits for dinner and watched the ocean crash into the sea walls. A starless sky climbed high above them.

"Me and Adah are moving in together," Batty announced suddenly. She ducked her head and blushed fiercely, shoving too much honey and biscuit into her mouth.

Rosalind gushed. "That's wonderful, honey."

"We're happy for you Battykins," Jane said. Skye bobbed her head in agreement.

Batty beamed.

The night stretched on. They told stories and opened wines.

When Rosalind refused a glass and Skye arched a questioning brow, Rosalind blew a small, determined breath through her teeth. "I'm pregnant," Rosalind whispered. She kept her eyes trained on the black expanse of water below them, and it was as if she were talking to the sea.

Three pairs of wide eyes swiveled toward to her, followed by laughter and tears and much talk of baby names.

When Skye went to bed that night, lying next to her sisters on a blowup mattress in Jane's living room and listening to the whirl of the fan and the chirp of the crickets through the opened window, she thought about her family. Thought about the baby humming to life in Rosalind's body, whispering all kinds of promises for life. Thought about Jane and her bees. Thought about Jeffrey. The blood on his teeth when she ran into him in a hedge tunnel. The colors in his eyes in six a.m. light. She wished suddenly that Jeffrey were there, lying in the dark with her.

_Dear reader, here is a heart made lousy with desire. Nothing is burning, but everything, she thinks, is on fire._

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this several years ago and found it recently on my laptop, largely unedited and unfinished. I spent the summer fixing it up for you all but I left a lot of the original content as a bit of a tribute to my younger self. The story is often a bit out of character, something I have become much better at as I have grown older, but I apologize in advance for that. It was almost entirely written before The Penderwicks in Spring came out so it's not in compliance with that. Also note that the first part of each chapter is written as a flashback - I hope this is clear. The whole story has been written, so updates will depend on the response that I get. Love you all.


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